Subsea cable networks in the Red Sea were damaged, causing extensive interruptions for internet customers in India, Pakistan, and areas of the Middle East. The disruption has brought attention to how vulnerable the world’s digital infrastructure is, as it is mostly dependent on underwater cables for connectivity. South Asia was not the only region affected by the outage. In the United Arab Emirates, users also complained about having trouble getting internet services, especially when using the Etisalat and Du networks. The outages were verified by NetBlocks, which also linked the issue to cable infrastructure problems close to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. However, it is still unclear what or who damaged the subsea cables. Unintentional anchor drags, natural disasters, or, in rare instances, deliberate sabotage are frequently blamed for such outages. A sizable amount of the world’s internet traffic is carried by undersea fiber-optic cables, which are primarily concentrated in the Red Sea region.
Microsoft, a multinational technology giant, said that one of the services impacted by the event was its cloud computing platform, Azure. Microsoft stated in a statement on Saturday that “multiple undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea” may result in greater latency for Azure users. According to Reuters, Microsoft has rerouted traffic via other routes outside of the Middle East in order to lessen the impact. The business explained that other international services are unaffected, even if internet traffic passing through the area can experience delays. We do anticipate increased latency for certain traffic that used to pass through the Middle East. It doesn’t affect network traffic that doesn’t pass through the Middle East,” Microsoft said. Since undersea cable systems are the foundation of international internet services, the event highlights growing worries about their security and upkeep. Businesses, cloud services, and individual users can all be impacted by outages in these networks, according to experts, which can spread across countries. Maintaining the reliability of these vital infrastructure systems is now more important than ever due to the growing reliance on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
